Alan Caruba's blog is a daily look at events, personalities, and issues from an independent point of view. Copyright, Alan Caruba, 2015. With attribution, posts may be shared. A permission request is welcome. Email acaruba@aol.com.

Tuesday, October 15, 2013

Too Much Illegal Immigration

By Alan
Caruba

Like many
members of my generation, I would not be an American if my Italian and Russian
grandparents had not got on the boat and came here. We are fond of calling
America “a nation of immigrants”, but what happens when there are too many
immigrants, many of whom are here illegally? And that is the problem that has
defied a solution since the last big amnesty in 1986.

As Texas Governor Rick Perry said in his book 'Fed Up', “We
have already been burned once by false promises of border security in exchange
for tying security to other aspects of the immigration debate. President
Reagan, in 1986, signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which legalized
close to 3 million undocumented immigrants.”

“The law was supposed to be a comprehensive solution with
provisions intended to clamp down on border security. These provisions were
never enforced, and the subsequent explosion in illegal crossings has resulted
in some eleven million illegal aliens living in the United States today.”

Amnesty was an issue in the 2012 elections and it will be an
issue in 2014 so long the “Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and
Immigration Modernization Act”, S.744 awaits a vote. It is a very bad law for
a number of reasons. First among them is the fact that there are the millions
of aliens who are here illegally, but who cost natural-born and naturalized
Americans billions.

At a time of high unemployment, American taxpayers shell out
hundreds of billions as the result of illegal immigration in the form of:

# Welfare costs

# Food assistance programs

# Medicaid

# Primary and secondary school education for children who
are here illegally

# Incarceration (30% of all federal inmates are illegal
aliens)

And these same illegal aliens send billions home in
remittances to their countries of origin.

I thought about this as I watched the news coverage of a
gathering on the National Mall of advocates of S.744, rallying for its passage.
At the time, the Mall was closed to American citizens, including veterans,
because of the government shutdown. That did not stop the “Camino Americano
March for Dignity and Respect” from gaining permission to rally. Minority
Leader Nancy Pelosi showed up to lend support along with Democrat and
Republican Congressional Representatives of Latino heritage.

The Democrats know that, if they issue a form of instant citizenship
to illegal aliens, most of whom are Latino, they will have a loyal voting bloc
that will give them control of Congress and the White House for decades to
come. They don’t really care what impact the expansion of already over-extended
entitlement and welfare programs will have on the economy.

Steven A. Camarota, Director of Research of the Center for Immigration Studies, an independent, non-partisan, non-profit research
organization, recently addressed the impact of S.744 in an analysis titled “How
Many New Voters Would S.744 Create?”

Here are some of his findings:

# Based
on the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analysis of S.744, we project that the
bill will add 4.6 million new potential voters above the number added by the
current level of legal immigration by 2024. The bill would add 9.5 million
potential voters by 2028 and 17.3 million by 2036.

# Of
the new potential voters S.744 would create by 2036, slightly more than
one-third would be a result of the bill’s amnesty provisions based on CBO
projections, the rest are due to the bill’s large increases in future legal
immigration.

# Even
without the effects of S.744, the current level of immigration will add 5.1
million new potential voting-age citizens to the country by 2024, 8.4 million
by 2028, and 14.9 million by 2036.

# Combined,
the current level of immigration plus the additions from S.744 would create
nearly 10 million potential voting-age citizens by 2024, and more than 32
million by 2036.

# The
32 million potential voters current immigration plus S.744 will create is
slightly larger than the number of Americans over age 65 who voted in 2012. It
is more than twice the number of veterans who voted in 2012, and nearly three
times the number of Hispanics who voted last year.

# For
legal permanent immigrants to be potential voters they must be at least 18
years old and have lived in the country for at least five years, allowing them
to naturalize. For most amnesty beneficiaries under S.744, it will take at
least a decade for them to naturalize.

# These
projections are only for potential immigrant voters, not their U.S.-born children.
The projections take into account deaths, return-migration, and residency
requirements to naturalize. We do not estimate the share that will actually
naturalize and vote once eligible to do so.

Camarota’s
analysis adds up to 17 million potential voters within 25 years.

The
United States of America is broke and both parties that have held the White
House have contributed to the debt, although it is a fact that President Obama
has literally doubled it since taking office in 2009. Entitlement programs such
as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, will have to be reformed if they are
to continue. In their present form they are financially unsustainable.

Now
add in an amnesty for millions of illegal aliens and their children, just
because they decided to jump to the front of the line instead of seeking
citizenship as so many others have. Either we have borders or we don’t.

3 comments:

Alan, I have one solution to the problem, TERM LIMITS. If the house and senate members would be restricted to no more than 8 years in office, there would be no reason for them to pander for votes, legal or illegal. It's all about power and $, always is.

Our porous borders are the best recruiting tool the Dems have, not to mention a direct route into the USA for any wanting to do wrong in this nation...

There's a ton of reasons for securing the borders and deporting ILLEGALS but no one has the fortitude to address those issues, political correctness says NO..

I sent Janet Napolitano a message a while back, after one of her visits to the birder in El Paso I believe.. She was there at NOON, with tons of security and told the news people that the border was safer than ever before..

I told her I could take her to places on that border that would scare the living hell out of her at midnight..

About Me

I am and have been for a long time a writer by profession. I have several books to my credit and my daily column, "Warning Signs", is disseminated on many Internet news and opinion websites, as well as blogs. In addition, I am a longtime book reviewer and have a blog offering a monthly report on new fiction and non-fiction.